Lab 7 (Wk. 8)

Lab 7 - Working with Census Data

In this week's lab the objectives were to learn to find census data, use census data with ArcMaps, and learn to use GIS to create the three maps required.

The first map I have created below shows the Asian population in the United States by county in the year 2000. It helps use to see what the distribution of Asians is in our country. Some counties are as little as 0.0085% Asian, whereas other counties have as many as 46% of their residents from Asian descent. That is nearly half. By inspecting the map, we can see that more Asian people live on the coasts than southern or middle America. This makes sense as the West close is area of the United States closest to Asia and people came to find work. The New England region also so an influx of Asians immigrating to the United States through Ellis Island. I would be interested to see the same data for the latest census, to see if Asian Americans have spread over more of the country. 

Map 1: Asian Population Percentage. Data from 2000 Census.

The second map, provided below, is similar to the first map, except that I focused on African-Americans. Some counties in the United States are almost entirely African American, at roughly 87%. The county with the smallest percentage of African Americans has 0.01%. Unlike the Asian population, which is concentrated on the coasts due to logical immigration routes, the counties with the greatest black concentration are in the South. This can be attributed to history. Many Blacks were brought to this country long ago as slaves to work on plantation. The majority of these plantations were located in the southern United States.

Map 2: African American population  percentage by county. Data from 2000 Census.

Lastly, we come to the third map. The data in this map was provided by people who marked "Some Other Race" on the 2000 census. The distribution of these people is shown in Map 3. According to the census website, the vast majority of people who mark "some other race" are of Hispanic or Latino descent. The county with the highest percentage of Others reported about 39%. This translates to about 2 out of every 5 people. We can see that Others are heavily concentrated in the Southwest part of the US and Florida. This makes sense if most of the Others are of Latino. The Southwest United States like Arizona and California are very close to Mexico and South America and Florida is close to Cuba. People who emigrate from sadi countries generally stay in the areas of the US close to their home countries.

Map 2: People who marked "some other race." Percentage by county. Data from 2000 Census.

Overall, I had fun doing this assignment.  It is interesting to see how historical events which occurred well over 100 years ago greatly affect population distributions to this day. Once certain ethnicity are establish in an area they seem to stay there. Though many people may have traveled far to come to our great country, they seemed to not want to move anywhere once they arrived. It is also rather fascinating to see the huge range of counties with such little amounts of Blacks to such high amounts. 

The power of ArcMaps and GIS impressed me in this week's lab. The amount of data involved in these maps is not at all trivial, and ArcMaps handled it all quite gracefully. Even image rendering is done without any hiccups in the program. At this point, I have become very comfortable creating maps and changing projections and properties  as well as adding the basics like neatlines and legends. We also used the North American Lambert Conformal Conic projection this week, which made the information presented much clearer. 

Sources: www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf
http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb11-cn125.html